Kiners Korner Chronicles: The Franchise Comes Home

When we started the Kiners Korner Chronicles, the premise was an honest one: the tapes of Ralph Kiner's postgame show were gone — erased, reused, lost to time — so we did the next best thing. We researched the games and imagined the conversations.

I'm proud of those pieces. But let's be honest with each other: a recreation is a tribute, not the real thing. You can get every word in the box score right and still miss the one thing that made it Kiner's Korner — Ralph himself, in that chair, on that night, with a player still wearing half his uniform, saying something no one would ever think to script. Sometimes, even trying to recreate something lost never quite does it justice.

So we're shifting our focus.

Over the years, my friend and co-author Howie Karpin and I were able to rescue more than 50 episodes of the greatest postgame show that ever aired. And I'm not done — I am still on the lookout, still hunting for the ones that are out there in somebody's closet, garage, or storage box. If you've got a tape, I want to hear from you.

Starting now, we're going to revisit them one by one, right here. The real Ralph. The real guests. The real nights — the game set in front of you, and then the show itself, exactly as it happened. No recreations. No stand-ins.

This site exists because of that show. Now we get to watch it again — together.

And there is only one place to start: with a homecoming.

The Game — Opening Day, April 5, 1983

Six years. That's how long it had been since the Midnight Massacre — since the Mets traded Tom Seaver to Cincinnati and broke this fan base's heart in a way it has never quite gotten over. On December 16, 1982, the Mets finally brought him home, sending Charlie Puleo, Lloyd McClendon and Jason Felice to the Reds to undo the worst trade in franchise history.

So on a sunny Tuesday afternoon at Shea, 46,687 people showed up for a last-place team — because The Franchise was back in the home whites, back in No. 41, taking the ball on Opening Day for the 14th time in his career, tying Walter Johnson's major league record.

Seaver declined the customary ride in from the bullpen in the little cart. Instead, he walked — down the right-field line, through a roar that people who were there still talk about — and then went to work. He struck out Pete Rose, the very first batter he faced. Through six innings, in a duel with Steve Carlton on the other side, Seaver allowed the Phillies three hits, struck out five, and did not allow a run.

The Mets finally got to Carlton in the seventh. Dave Kingman, George Foster and Hubie Brooks opened with singles to load the bases. Mike Howard singled home Kingman with the game's first run, and a Brian Giles sacrifice fly brought home the second. Doug Sisk pitched the final three innings to earn the win. Mets 2, Phillies 0.

Seaver got a no-decision in the box score. Nobody at Shea that day cared. The box score wasn't the story. The story was that Tom Seaver was a Met again — and after it was over, he walked into the little studio, sat down across from Ralph Kiner, and did the show.

The Show

Watch the warmup jacket. Seaver comes to the desk still wearing it, and Ralph goes straight to the moment everybody at Shea will remember as long as they live: the ovation when Seaver walked in from the bullpen. Seaver admits people had been asking him ever since the trade back how that walk would feel, and that for a pitcher who prided himself on never letting emotion onto the mound, the walk past all those memories nearly got him — it took him a couple of innings to calm down. It was, he says, a very emotional moment, and it could not have turned out to be a better day.

Then Ralph does what Ralph did better than anybody: he rolls the highlights and lets the guest narrate his own life. Up comes the 1967 All-Star Game, a kid a year and a half out of USC closing out the 15th inning with his parents and his wife in the Anaheim stands. Seaver can't get over the company on the field that afternoon at Shea — Rose, Morgan, Carlton, Pérez, Kingman, Foster — veterans of that same era, all of them. Like an old-timers game, he says. They watch him strike out Carl Yastrzemski. They watch the 1968 game in Houston, and Seaver tells the story of the only time he ever faced Mickey Mantle — three fastballs, three swings, with his father watching. And when Ralph asks about the hitters who owned him, the names aren't Aaron or Mays. They're Tommy Hutton and Woody Woodward, and Seaver laughs saying it.

Ralph floats the milestones ahead of him — 300 wins, 3,000 strikeouts — and Seaver waves off the numbers. He'd like to win 300, he says, but only pitching well enough to deserve it; he isn't going to hang on just to get there. (For the record: the 3,000th strikeout came thirteen days later, April 18. The 300th win had to wait for 1985.)

There's the other side of him, too — Ralph rolls a clip of Seaver's Old-Timers' Day stunt, impersonating pitching coach Rube Walker in a stolen uniform stuffed with towels, and Seaver lights up telling it. And he explains why six innings was all: his left quadriceps grabbed at him in the sixth, he told George Bamberger about it, and nobody was going to risk it popping on Opening Day. He came out for a pinch-hitter to start the seventh — which is right when Carlton finally tired and the Mets scratched out their two runs. Seaver makes sure the win gets shared around: Howard, Brooks, Kingman, Foster, the bullpen. A team effort.

Then they watch the first batter of the game together. Seaver walks Ralph pitch by pitch through striking out Pete Rose — twice, it turned out — including the backup slider that behaved, and he delivers the day's neatest irony himself: the last time he'd pitched at Shea as a Met, wearing Cincinnati's uniform, he struck Rose out three times. “You're not going to strike Pete out too often,” he says, grinning.

And the show ends the way it should. Ralph brings out the winning pitcher — Doug Sisk, who'd just recorded the first victory of his major league career, in relief of Tom Seaver. Sisk walks through the ninth: the walk to Morgan, the Matthews single, getting Schmidt to fly out on one pitch, and the final batter, Tony Pérez, who could have beaten him with one swing. Sisk's plan was to get ahead fast and trust that Pérez would chase — and Pérez did, swinging through a breaking ball in the dirt. Asked about that last pitch, Sisk doesn't dress it up: it was a bad slider. It just happened to be in the one place Pérez couldn't hit it.

That's the show. Not a recreation of it — the show, with the Franchise in the warmup jacket and a rookie reliever still glowing next to him.

What we can tell you now is what it meant to have this one back. Of all the episodes we rescued, this is the one where the show and the day are the same story: a return. Seaver came home in April of 1983. This show came home forty-some years later, out of a tape box, because Howie Karpin and I refused to believe it was gone forever.

Next in the series, we rewind to the very beginning of the rescued run — the earliest episode we have. Join us there. And if you're sitting on a tape of this show — any tape, any year — the hunt is still on, and we want to hear from you.

Down on the Korner — the book Howie and I wrote about this show and these Mets — is available here.

Watch the rescued episodes as we revisit them: the Kiner's Korner archive playlist.

Box score: Retrosheet via Baseball-Reference.